Mount Ararat

• 1. Introduction

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  Mount Ararat is a snow-capped, dormant volcano in the far east of Turkey. In a 2024 poll in Armenia, 86 percent of respondents said that seeing it stirs strong emotions. Yet the mountain lies outside Armenia's borders. How did a peak in a neighbouring state become the central emblem of a nation? Why did Armenian clergy once object to anyone climbing it? What happened on the day this quiet giant turned deadly? And why is it tied so firmly to a boat that science has never found?

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• 2. Names Upon Names

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  The mountain was not called Ararat until the Middle Ages, and none of its native peoples traditionally used that name. Early Armenian historians placed the biblical Ararat in a region called Corduene. European writers later attached the name to this peak. It ultimately descends from the Hebrew name of Urartu, an Iron Age kingdom. Archibald Sayce proposed that Urartu meant highlands. Ayrarat, a central province of ancient Armenia, shares the same root. The scholar Robert W. Thomson suggested that the mountain acquired its name "by confusion with Ayrarat, the name of the province."

  Turkish speakers know the mountain as Ağrı Dağı. Ağrı means pain or grief, so the name is rendered as mountain of pain, a nod to how hard the ascent is. Official Turkish sources instead derive it from Ağır Dağ, the heavy mountain. Kurds call it Çiyayê Agirî, the fiery mountain. Sevan Nişanyan suggests that both names come from Ağori, a village on its slopes that a landslide decimated. Sargis Petrosyan offers a different route, from an Armenian word for a branch used to propagate a vine.

  Armenians call it Masis. The name comes from Azat Masik', the classical name of the greater peak, where azat means high, though it has also been translated as free or noble. Today Greater Ararat is Mets Masis, or Great Masis. Lesser Ararat is Sis, or Little Masis. A folk explanation recorded by the historian Movses Khorenatsi credits King Amasya, great-grandson of the legendary patriarch Hayk, who supposedly named it after himself. Scholars favour other theories. Anatoly Novoseltsev points to the Middle Persian masist, meaning the largest. Armen Petrosyan sees a link to Mashu, a mountain in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  In Strabo's Geographica, the two peaks appear in Greek as Abos and Nibaros. Sargis Petrosyan reads them as grandfather and new, a pairing of the elder peak and the younger one. Persian speakers call the whole mountain Kuh-e Nuh, the mountain of Noah, a name that points toward the story that made it famous far from home.

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• 3. Fire Beneath the Snow

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  Mount Ararat covers 1100 square kilometres, which makes it the largest volcanic structure in its region. Two cones make up the massif. Greater Ararat, the western cone, reaches 5137 metres and is about 25 kilometres wide at its base. Lesser Ararat, to the east, stands 3896 metres high and 15 kilometres across. The cones lie 13 kilometres apart, divided by a wide crack running north to south. That crack marks an extensional fault, and small cones and lava domes have grown along it. In all, the volcano holds roughly 1150 cubic kilometres of ash, debris and lava. Only Elbrus and Damavand surpass it in prominence across West Asia.

  The deeper cause is a continental collision. Between the early Eocene and the early Miocene, the Arabian platform pressed into Laurasia and closed the Tethys Ocean. The squeeze lifted the East Anatolian-Iranian plateau, and it continues today, driving faults, volcanoes and earthquakes. Ararat sits inside a pull-apart basin opened by sideways-sliding faults. The volcano's own growth later split that basin into two, the Iğdir and Doğubeyazıt basins.

  Geologists reading the rock in the mountain's glacial valleys have identified four building stages. First came fissure eruptions that laid down more than 700 metres of fragmented volcanic rock. Next, activity focused on a single point, and lava flows up to 150 metres thick built the low cone of Greater Ararat. A third stage gave both cones their present shape through eruptions along side cracks. The last stage brought flank eruptions, as a major north-south fault offset the two cones. One side vent sent basalt and andesite across the Doğubeyazıt plain and along the Sarısu River. Those black flows contain well preserved lava tubes and date to 0.4, 0.48 and 0.81 million years ago. Rocks from the whole volcano range from 1.5 million to 20,000 years old.

  People have lived beside it through its recent eruptions. Archaeology shows that explosive eruptions and pyroclastic flows from the northwest flank buried at least one settlement of the Kura-Araxes culture between 2500 and 2400 BC, killing many. Oral history points to a significant eruption in 550 BC. Smaller ones may have followed in 1450 and 1783 AD. Earthquakes also struck the area in 139, 368, 851-893 and 1319 AD. The 139 quake shook loose a deadly landslide from the summit, much like the one that came later.

  The worst episode on record began on the 2nd of July 1840. A phreatic, or steam-driven, eruption sent pyroclastic flow down fissures on the upper north flank. A possibly linked earthquake of magnitude 7.4 followed, and up to 10,000 people died. In the village of Akhuri, called Akori in Armenian and Yenidoğan today, a gigantic landslide and debris flow killed 1,900 villagers. The same debris destroyed the Armenian monastery of St. Jacob, the town of Aralik, several villages and Russian military barracks. It even dammed the Sevjur River, also known as Metsamor, for a time.

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• 4. The Shrinking Ice Cap

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  In the late 1950s, a researcher named Blumenthal counted 11 outlet glaciers flowing from a summit snow mass of about 10 square kilometres. On the north-facing slope the ice reached down to 3900 metres. On the south-facing slope it stopped near 4200 metres. Blumenthal also estimated that during the Late Pleistocene the snow line sat as low as 3000 metres, which would have produced an ice cap of 100 square kilometres.

  The evidence for that older ice is thin. Blumenthal found no clear prehistoric moraines, the ridges of debris that glaciers leave behind, except near the glacier tongues of 1958. He blamed the lack of confining ridges, too little debris in the ice, and burial under later eruptions. Years later, Birman spotted a possible moraine on the south-facing slopes, at least 300 metres below the base of the 1958 ice cap. He also found two deposits left by a Pleistocene valley glacier downvalley from Lake Balık. The higher one lies at about 2200 metres and the lower at about 1800 metres, and both stand roughly 30 metres tall. The lower one is about 15 kilometres downstream, and the lake itself is suspected to fill a glacial basin.

  The modern record is one of steady loss. Sarıkaya and colleagues used aerial imagery and remote sensing to measure the cap between 1976 and 2011. It covered 8.0 square kilometres in 1976 and 5.7 in 2011. That is a 29 percent loss, averaging 0.07 square kilometres a year over 35 years. The pace matches the retreat of other summit glaciers in Turkey.

  The melting even touches the mountain's height. Some reference works give 5165 metres for the summit. The United States Geological Survey and many topographic maps favour 5137 metres, and the true figure may now be as low as 5125 metres because the ice cap is thinning. A 2020 study by Yalcin put the stakes plainly: "if the glacial withdrawals continue with the same acceleration, the permanent glacier will likely turn into a temporary glacier by 2065."

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• 5. The Forbidden Summit

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  "Many have tried to climb it, but none has been able." So wrote the 13th century missionary William of Rubruck, and for centuries the summit stayed out of reach. The Armenian Apostolic Church historically opposed ascents on religious grounds. The 18th-century English theologian Thomas Stackhouse recorded the belief that the ark survived on the summit and that no person was permitted to approach it. When the peak was finally climbed, one high-ranking church figure complained that the climbers had acted "to tie the womb of the mother of all mankind in a dragonish mode." In the 21st century the attitude has reversed. Climbing Ararat is now a prized goal of patriotic pilgrimages organised from Armenia and its diaspora.

  The first recorded ascent began in mid-September 1829, when the Baltic German naturalist Friedrich Parrot of the University of Dorpat reached Etchmiadzin. He came for the sole purpose of exploring Ararat, almost two years after Russia captured Yerevan. Catholicos Yeprem, head of the Armenian Church, assigned the writer Khachatur Abovian, then a deacon and translator, as his interpreter and guide.

  They crossed the Aras River into the district of Surmalu and reached Akhuri, 1220 metres above sea level on the northern slope. About 730 metres higher, at 1943 metres, they set up camp at the monastery of St. Hakob. Two attempts failed. On the third, at 3:15 p.m. on the 9th of October 1829, they stood on the summit. With Parrot and Abovian were two Russian soldiers, Aleksei Zdorovenko and Matvei Chalpanov, and two Akhuri villagers, Hovhannes Aivazian and Murad Poghosian.

  Parrot measured the height at 5250 metres with a mercury barometer. By that date only Licancabur in the Chilean Andes had given climbers a higher vantage. Abovian dug a hole in the ice and set up a wooden cross facing north. He also filled a bottle with a chunk of summit ice and carried it down, considering the water holy. Parrot and Abovian later climbed Lesser Ararat as well, guided by Hako, the brother of an Akhuri hunter named Sahak.

  Others soon followed. The climatologist Kozma Spassky-Avtonomov went up in August 1834, and Karl Behrens in 1835. The geologist Otto Wilhelm Hermann von Abich climbed on the 29th of July 1845. British climbers included Henry Danby Seymour in 1848, Major Robert Stuart in 1856, James Bryce in 1876 and H. F. B. Lynch in 1893. The first winter ascent came on the 21st of February 1970, by the Turkish alpinist Bozkurt Ergör.

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• 6. Noah's Ark

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  "We are close to Mount Ararat, where tradition says that the Ark of Noah came to rest." Pope John Paul II spoke those words in 2001, in a homily at St. Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral in Yerevan. In 2010 Patriarch Kirill of Moscow likewise named the mountain as the ark's resting place, speaking at Etchmiadzin Cathedral.

  The Book of Genesis says only that the ark landed on the "mountains of Ararat." Scholars generally read that as a region rather than a single peak, and the Latin Vulgate renders it as montes Armeniae, the mountains of Armenia. Arnold's 2008 commentary on Genesis makes the same point. Still, the link to this mountain took hold in the 11th century, when Armenians began to identify it as the landing place. Maps of the world from that era often drew the ark upon it. F. C. Conybeare argued that Armenian theologians placed the ark there only after older pagan myths and cults had faded from popular memory.

  William of Rubruck is usually counted as the earliest European source for the tradition. John Mandeville repeated it, writing of the place "where Noah's ship rested, and it is still there." Most Christians, including most of Western Christianity, accept the identification, largely because the mountain would have been the first peak to emerge from the receding flood. In 1856, H. G. O. Dwight called it the general opinion of the learned in Europe. In an 1878 article for the Royal Geographical Society, James Bryce argued that the biblical writer must have had this peak in mind. He called it "very much higher, more conspicuous, and more majestic than any other summit in Armenia."

  The search for physical proof is long. In his 1722 biblical dictionary, Augustin Calmet noted a claim of ark remains on the summit, "affirmed, but without proof." He added that Tournefort, who visited, found nothing and judged the top inaccessible. Expeditions, sometimes backed by evangelical and millenarian churches, have gone looking since the 19th century. A 1974 book counted around 200 people from more than 20 countries who claimed to have seen the ark on Ararat since 1856. A fragment said to come from the ark is displayed in the museum at Etchmiadzin Cathedral. Yet "no scientific evidence of the ark has emerged," and scholars class the searches as pseudoarchaeology. A boat-shaped rock formation at the Durupınar site in the Ararat region has drawn its own attempts to find the ark.

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• 7. Myth and Verse

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  Deep in a cave on Ararat, according to Movses Khorenatsi, the Armenian king Artavazd II lies bound in iron chains. His father, Artaxias I, cursed him to be seized by supernatural beings called k'ajk', meaning brave ones. Two dogs eternally lick at his bonds to free him. Folklore says his release would destroy the world or transform it completely. To keep the chains strong, Armenian blacksmiths traditionally struck their anvils on the first day of the week or during the festival of Navasard. Later Christian tellings turned Artavazd from a possible redeemer into a demonic figure. Nina Garsoïan suggests the legend blends him with his treacherous brother Tigranes the Younger and echoes his capture by Mark Antony and imprisonment in Egypt.

  Older beliefs filled the mountain with other creatures. In pre-Christian Armenia, mountains were sacred, and folk tradition said that vishaps, dragon-like beings living on Ararat and Aragats, fought one another every two years. Khorenatsi also tied the Genesis flood to Armenian origins. In his telling, Noah's family first settled in Armenia. Hayk, a descendant of Noah's son Japheth, later revolted against Bel, the biblical Nimrod, and returned to the Ararat area to found the Armenian nation.

  The mountain appears on ancient coins too. A coin of Artaxias I shows an eagle perched on a mountain, probably Ararat above Artaxata. Twin peaks appear on coins minted from 2 BC to AD 1 by the co-rulers Tigranes IV and Erato.

  Poets followed. Rouben Paul Adalian suggested there is probably more poetry about Ararat than about any other mountain on earth. In 1920, Yeghishe Charents ended a poem with the lines: "And in the entire world you will not find a mountaintop like Ararat's. / Like an unreachable peak of glory I love my Mount Masis." Hovhannes Shiraz cited the mountain more than any other symbol, and in 2006 a group of four Armenians buried his heart at its summit. Paruyr Sevak wrote in 1961 that Armenians are few, and that "we, and only we, have an Ararat." Outsiders felt the pull as well. In 1933 the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote of cultivating "an 'Ararat' sense" of attraction to a mountain.

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• 8. Borders and Banners

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  From the 16th century until 1828, the mountain stood on the Ottoman-Persian border, and Persia held the summit of Greater Ararat and its northern slopes. After the Russo-Persian War of 1826-28 and the Treaty of Turkmenchay, Persia ceded that ground to the Russian Empire. Little Ararat became the point where Turkish, Persian and Russian frontiers met. The mountain passed to Turkey during the 1920 Turkish invasion of Armenia, and the Treaty of Moscow and the Treaty of Kars confirmed it in 1921.

  The frontier shifted once more in the late 1920s. Turkey crossed the Iranian line to occupy the eastern flank of Lesser Ararat, where Kurdish rebels of the Ararat rebellion were sheltering. In 1927 the Kurdish nationalist party Xoybûn, led by Ihsan Nuri, declared an independent Republic of Ararat centred on the mountain. Iran eventually agreed to give the area to Turkey in a territorial exchange. Today the peak sits near a point where Turkey, Iran, Armenia and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan almost meet.

  Armenia's coat of arms has shown the mountain consistently since 1918. The architect Alexander Tamanian and the painter Hakob Kojoyan designed the First Republic's emblem, with the ark on the peak against an orange background. Armenia's legislature readopted it on the 19th of April 1992. Martiros Saryan and Hakob Kojoyan created the Soviet Armenian emblem in 1921, with Ararat filling much of its centre. A widely repeated anecdote says Turkey protested to Moscow, and Foreign Commissar Georgy Chicherin replied that Turkey's flag carries a crescent moon without Turkey owning the moon. Later sources call the story likely apocryphal, though it appears in Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs.

  After the Armenian genocide of 1915, Ararat took on a darker meaning. It came to stand for the destruction of Armenian communities in eastern Turkey and for longing for a lost homeland. Turkish analysts argue that frequent references to the mountain show Armenians contest the border. Since independence in 1991 the Armenian government has made no official territorial claim, though it has avoided formally recognising the existing border. Asked by Der Spiegel in 2010 whether Armenia wants the mountain back, President Serzh Sargsyan answered: "No one can take Mount Ararat from us; we keep it in our hearts." The nationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation does lay claim to eastern Turkey as part of a United Armenia.

  The mountain's names have travelled far from its slopes. Armenian villages were renamed Ararat and Masis between 1935 and 1971, and Turkey named its province Ağrı in 1927. A river in Virginia and North Carolina bore the name by 1770. A city in the Australian state of Victoria took it in 1840. In 1992 Freimut Börngen and Lutz D. Schmadel discovered an asteroid at Tautenburg Observatory in Germany, and Börngen proposed naming it 96205 Ararat.

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